JAMES TAM  谭炳昌

Finally, we've reached the end of the Flower Lounge story. The Court of Appeal made a long story very short on the 9th of May, 2012. 

Finally, we've reached the end of the Flower Lounge story. Contemplation may not be an existential prerequisite, but is very likely the primary distinction between man and beast. Only through deliberate thinking can humans deny, restrain, or indulge basic instincts and develop human nature, for better or for worse. Trying to understand one’s existence is a natural, reflexive, down-to-earth human curiosity; it doesn’t have to be arcanely philosophical.

Justice is paradoxically unique and universal, intuitive and complex all at once. Humanity seems further from universal justice after millennia of contemplation, deliberation, and experimentation. It was high time that some prisoner gave this dead-end issue some good thinking in his plentiful spare time. I volunteered. From social justice, my reverie ventured into slippery territories like reincarnation.

Freedom is a bewitching phantom. Many who defend it with a passion don’t seem to know what it is. They can’t define or describe its basic features, significance, or potential meaning to our lives. Why is it so blindly, embraced? If a hungry person gets food, he gobbles it up. What would an unfree person do if given unlimited freedom? These questions tickled my mind when I stood still to kill time in jail, surrounded by men who had been denied freedom

On the 7th of May, I was summoned to Fingerprint Room and told that our appeal application would be heard in the High Court two days later. It will be an application hearing to decide if we had sufficient grounds for appeal. I tried to maintain an even mind. No anticipation. No wishful thinking. But hope, like fear, or humidity, is hard to quell. After receiving this hopeful news, I lost concentration for the rest of the day, attempting incoherently to think about nothing

Don't want to dwell on the trial or to prove innocence (or otherwise) in this story. Anyone who's been trawled through the justice system would always be tainted in the eyes of some, and remain perpetually innocent to those who believe him to be guiltless from the onset. Furthermore, I know by now guilt is largely decided by judicial whims, luck, and, most critically, money. Facts and evidence are secondary. Nonetheless, this seems a suitable juncture to introduce some kind o

Experienced See Hings told me that Bible hours were conducive to parole approval. It was not an official criterion, but old cons knew how things worked. At the very least, Bible thumping means no work once a week, plus candies. To my criminal mind, it smells like bribery. Though a convicted briber, I refused to be bribed. Plus I worried that my heretic tongue would lose control in a Bible discussion class. On Easter, I did request to join the Triads instead, but was promptly

Within a few weeks, I had filled two notebooks with personal observations and anecdotes collected from fellow inmates. They got jailed for many reasons. But behind legal technicality, one underlying cause dominated — money — that prolific mother of all evils accentuated by greed, desperation, or simple bad luck. Without money, Flower Lounge would be a very quiet place. Some stories are over-the-top fantastic, but that doesn’t necessarily make them false or irrelevant.

In prison, strangers from unthinkable corners of society live closely together for a term of time, then go their own ways. In all likelihood, they may never meet again, especially for ‘non-professionals’ like myself. Like nomads chancing upon each other in the desert, courtesy cannot be taken for granted. Spontaneous kindness to a stranger under that situation is genuinely moving, especially when that stranger is me.

I won’t give up hope, but am trying not to think about the future, or the past. The dilemma is I don’t wish to focus on the present either. I think the adage ‘live in the moment’ needs reconsideration. What if the moment is abominable, like, right now? Contrived positive thinking aside, adapting to being locked up is tough. Having adapted once, the prospect of repeating the process (should we lose the appeal and have to come back in after having been released on bail) becomes

Given a choice between forced indolence and forced labour, I suspect most people would opt for the former, unless they have experienced sitting in a room full of noisy men who have no other occupation but sitting in a room full of noisy men, day after day, year after year. In that non-event, time — that mystically elastic entity which Einstein said varies with speed, that abstract marker of life which prisoners are condemned to serve — may gum up and stall.

Hollywood prisons are full of hairy, muscular, stinky, beastly cons, shimmering with sweat, indiscriminately sex-crazed without due respect to gender, age, religion, situation, or political persuasion. Maybe that’s reality, who knows? Instinctual needs of the younger cons cannot be simply ignored, unless...

Humans fantasise themselves lovers of variety, serendipity, challenges and, believe it or not, adventures. This romantic illusion, creates an irrational discontent about a steady and predictable life such as the one at Tong Fuk prison. The menu was precise and consistent. One knew exactly what will be served for dinner tonight, tomorrow, and the third Thursday nineteen months into the future. Notwithstanding high predictability, many things in jail defy understanding.

Urban household cats are prisoners serving life sentences. All day long, all life long, apartment cats stalk their own shadows cast by indoor lights. Most will never get the chance to confront a real mouse. The only nocturnal fun is to curl up against stinky human feet, purring for favour. Tong Fuk cats are lucky exceptions. They are free, freer than the inmates, freer than the guards.

I, a harmless old man, new and dumb, walked into Workshop Five to commence my career as a junior prison labourer with due meekness. There was a saying among the cons: ‘Eating and sleeping well reduces the sentence by a third.’ Mmm, what if one dreams of solitary confinement in the Water Rice Hole night after night, or getting chased down the street by the police or a chopper wielding competitor?

Rehearsing death had been my therapeutic tactic for a long time. But the jail setting and a bad flu made it real.

Feels strange to be moving out of the supposedly worst jail in Hong Kong soon. I have just started to feel settled here. After the emotional tremors and aftershocks of the past week, I have a deeply irrational wish to hang on to anything familiar, even a hellhole. If I were allowed to choose, I might just stay where I am, until — until it’s time to go home for dinner...I never say 'that’s so sad' The phrase is over-uttered by too many who don’t mean it. But I do feel eerily s

Marlboro hands me a news clipping of my verdict, expecting me to get excited over my own misfortune. If Jesus were crucified today, the apostles would probably line up to show him video clips of the crucifixion as soon as he emerged from momentary death. Many See Hings are from the working class, now called grassroots -- a green and refreshing metaphor suggesting that their underfoot station is natural and inevitable.

The shower hall is chaotic like the rest of LCK, and severely flooded...being naked without a tattoo makes me feel really naked. Now, where should I put my soap. There isn’t a holder anywhere, not even a chink in the wall. The floor is three inches under water. In the mouth? What if I swallow by accident?

【Flower Lounge】 Table of Content and Chapter One -- Broken Reality. Prison was diabolically different from what I had imagined. During my first day in jail, reality broke.